Economic History of Developing Regions

This publication that is hosted on SA ePublications is only available to sub-Saharan countries.

Economic History of Developing Regions promotes the study of economic change in the developing South, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. It provides an innovative research forum that explores the influence of historical events on economic development beyond the industrialized North. The journal accepts papers based on purely quantitative or qualitative methods, as well as any combination of the two. It seeks submissions with an economic history focus from disciplines such as general history, development economics, cliometrics, business history, labour history, financial history, development studies and others. The journal is the official publication of the Economic History Society of Southern Africa.

Latest Articles

There is now considerable evidence to suggest that historical events have had longterm
impacts on economic outcomes in Africa. What is less widely studied is the
potential for mitigating such impacts. We surveyed 400 pineapple farmers in
Ghana and find that both the historical dependency on different crops and the
impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade predict income differences in 2013.
However, not all farmers are affected equally by history. Using instrumental
variables to identify causal effects, we find that human and social capital are
pivotal for overcoming historically inherited constraints.

The savings-development nexus is a topical issue in current development literature.No
study has yet explored this relationship in nineteenth-century ‘SouthAfrican’ colonies.
An historical analysis of the development of the savings’ trends in South Africa may
assist in understanding development trends in the twentieth century. Apart from
general descriptions of the nature of economic activity in the Cape Colony very
little is known about the role of savings and financial sector development in the
growing colonial economy. This paper describes and surveys the nature of financial
markets in the Cape Colony between 1850 and 1909 and seeks to explain the
relationship between savings and economic growth. Savings is defined in the broad
sense of monetary and non-monetary savings and would be assumed to be a proxy
for financial development in the Cape Colony. This paper contributes to the
economic history literature on the colonial past of South Africa by using recently
compiled data on the GDP (Greyling & Verhoef 2015) as well as monetary savings
and non-monetary savings (livestock) to test whether the general view that ‘financial
development is robustly growth promoting’ can be substantiated in the last half of
the nineteenth-century Cape Colony. The Johansen vector error correction model
technique is applied to determine the relationship between savings and economic
growth. It is found that despite the expectations in the literature that financial
deepening contributes to economic growth, the Cape Colony did not display such
causal relationship in the period under review.

This article analyses the annual budgets of the Congo Free State to examine whether
the broader fiscal patterns observed for British, French and Portuguese Africa can be
found in Leopold’s colony; often considered a fiscal exception. The fiscal history of
the Free State was unique. A history of the income composition of the state
however reveals that Leopold’s revenue-raising strategies showed a lot of similarity
with colonial taxation in British, French and Portuguese Africa. Leopold’s
administration faced the fiscal challenge of ruling a vast, thinly populated,
inaccessible colony that produced little taxable surplus, with little metropolitan
support and limited access to international lending. To deal with this challenge,
the Free State developed a minimalistic fiscal system that was based on the
taxation of international trade and the African subject. Only during a commodity
boom did this system generate sufficient income to cover colonial expenditure. The
study of the not so exceptional case of the Free State hence supports the claim that
the colonial scope to tax African colonies was fundamentally determined by local
economic conditions and power relations, global demand for commodities and
Metropolitan pressure to be financially self-sufficient.